Review: Dutch Boy Refresh Paint

I was so excited to get an opportunity to review the new Dutch Boy Refresh Paint and share my thoughts on this product with you. Dutch Boy came out with this new paint that will add a nice fresh coat of paint to your walls and the paint additionally contains baking soda to help eliminate household odors.

We chose our living room as our room to paint because it was a spot in my house that I have been wanting to paint over. It is the room that you see when you first enter our house and countless fingerprints, smudges, and gashes in our wall made that spot in my house a true eye sore.

On painting day, the first thing that I noticed about this paint is that it is very easy to pour. I am usually struggling with pouring paint, but these jugs have an easy pour spout and a handle that makes it a lot easier to pour out your paint with a lot less mess.

Our color was Honey Bear, a nice yellow neutral, that would brighten our space. It was a light color so I was anxious to see if it would cover well. This paint went on so well that we had very little touching-up that we had to do because it covered so nicely. I love a paint that creates less work for me!

The real question though is if the baking soda made a difference in our room? To be honest, this paint investment might be better served in a room where there might be more odors (the nursery or your kitchen, perhaps?) but I still felt like the room smelled a lot fresher. What was better than the fresh smell though was the lack of paint fumes. I can feel queasy for days after we paint and this paint hardly smelled at all. All that I smelled was a nice neutral smell when I woke up the morning after painting.

The fact that this paint has 0 VOC’s makes this paint a more eco-friendly choice. If you are not familiar with VOC’s this means the “Volatile organic compounds” which are vapors released from paint as it dries and are thought to contribute to smog and ozone. RefreshTM paint is formulated without VOCs, which is one step closer to having less impact on our environment.

I can’t say how long this fresh smell will last although the company says that these odor-eliminating effects could last as long as a year. I am sure my family will put that theory to the test, but in the meantime we are absolutely loving our fresh new room! Need some inspiration for your space? Be sure to visit the Inspiration Gallery for some great ideas to update your look.

Next week, we will be unveiling our room and I can’t wait to share it with you!

hi! I am painting my entryway(smelly shoes!) with this new refresh paint. Yes, it smells great and I am a fairly experienced painter. However I am running into a problem with this paint. I am noticing (2nd layer) that is not drying evenly. it looks great wet—dry it is patchy and very uneven. Did you have this problem at all? I am using “green relaxation” color. It is also VERY HUMID in my area right now and I am prone to just blame it on that and wait a few more days and reapply another coat and hope for the bast. Any advice?
Thanks, Angi

i have now used the Refresh in 3 rooms. i loved the color, and the fact that it seems to help with the odor.
my only complaint is there is almost no way to get the 400 square feet of coverage as the label states. The smallest of the 3 rooms I did was only 325 sq feet, and I did not have enough to do the inside of the closet. I ended up watering down the paint to stretch it which probably eliminates all the odor protection I paid for.

Angi, Latex paint wont be fully cured for about 30 days; that’s why the packaging says to avoid scrubbing for that long.
So the color could change during that period, but should be pretty locked down after a day or two.
Side note: The universal colorant the paint guys use to color paint are not (usually) 0 voc, so the colorant could add a bit of smell and voc.

While the paint covered well, the smell is awful! It has been 3 days since my husband painted our bedroom and we still can’t go in there the paint smell is to strong. Its worse then regular paint. I would just go with a regular paint next time I might even paint over in order to try to get rid of the smell if in the next week it is not gone.

we bought sevral gallon of this paint. First ,yes it has low oder, but most pf all its not a 1 coat paint, had to double and even triple coat using this paint and we were painting over 2 month old white paint. Wouldn’t recomend this to anyone. Got it cheap but will probally have to repaint it.

1) This actually doesn’t have baking soda in it, the technology is much more advanced than simply pouring some Arm and Hammer into the bucket.

2) @ron: There’s really no such thing as a one coat paint, especially if you didn’t prime first. Dutch Boy has a “self-priming” paint line called Dimensions if you want superior coverage. But you should always prime first when using a mid-grade paint product. “One coat coverage” hinges on the skill in which it is applied.

I’m currently 8 months pregnant and have started working on our nursery. I went to my local home improvement store specifically looking for something low odor and 0 VOC. The only paint this particular store had that fit those requirements was this Dutch Boy Refresh so that’s what I got (don’t really care about the Arm & Hammer technology, just wanted 0 VOC and low odor). The nursery was originally a very light tan color (not quite off-white, but lighter than a full-blown tan) and I was painting the bottom half of the walls kind of a minty green and the top a nice baby yellow leaving 1 full wall the yellow for my mom to paint a mural.

ODOR: Not impressed at all. It smelled just as bad as any regular paint I’d ever used and I had to take breathing breaks often. The one plus I can say is that the odor doesn’t seem to linger as long as regular paints, but while you’re actually painting, it really isn’t what I’d call “low odor”. On a side note, a few months ago I’d gotten some Olympic low odor/0 VOC paint and it truly didn’t have any odor at all while I was painting (the only reason I didn’t get it this time is I went to a different store where it wasn’t available).

COVERAGE: I actually had both extremes. This is a pretty small room (9′x9′). The green went on the bottom half of 3 of the walls (in all fairness, one wall has 2 doors that take up about 90% of the spaceand the other has a window so we’ll say 2 walls). It actually covered in 1 coat with just a little bit of touch up. I’ve always had problems getting greens to cover for some reason; no mater what brand paint I was using so to start off with, I was quite impressed. Then I got to the yellow . . .

The yellow went on the top half of those 3 walls (again, with the window & doors, it was more like 2 walls) and all over the 1 full wall. The paint didn’t cover for crap. It took 3 coats (and I wasn’t skimpy on my coats either) plus touch ups and I still see places where I should probably touch up some more, but I’m tired of painting so I’m leaving it. I don’t think I’ve ever had a paint cover that poorly. It had taken about 3/4 gal to paint the room that light tan when we first bought the house. If I had been painting the entire room in this yellow, it probably would have taken 1 1/2 gallons to get it covered! As it is, I used almost an entire gallon just to do the 1 full wall and 2 half walls.

The long term odor eliminating qualities will have to wait a while to be evaluated. But as of right now, I’m highly disappointed in this paint and will not buying it in the future.

My husband is painting right now with the Arm & Hammer Refresh and I have to say that the smell is not that much better than your regular run of the mill $10.00 can of paint from your local cheap hardware store. Everyone is right, the coverage is pretty awful. We do have a red wine color, but so far as we see it, it will probably require 3 coats, which no one should ever have to do with any paint.

I used Sherwin Williams Harmony paint in the past 6 months (I am also pregnant, in my 10th month – baby due anytime), and it had a much better smell than the refresh.

I look forward to seeing how long the smell lingers though. Sherwin Williams Harmony paint smell lingered for at least two weeks and I did a yellow.

All in all, I think that this paint is worth the cost if you are real sensitive to paint smells… but I think there are other products out there that give it a run for its money.

I’m painting my entire house and thus far have used all Behr and Pittsburg; the upgraded ultra premium ones. The Bear was awesome. The pittsburg was real thick and I used 3 coats, as it was covering up semi-gloss green. Now, I’m using Dutch Boy refresh in a red. It’s as thin as water. It also bled through my painters tape. Was this brand as thin for any of you? Also, how do you remove all the paint that bled through from oak cabinets? The walls and ceiling I can just repaint over the red. So frustrating!